[In the following essay, Gregory investigates the influence of Harold Pinter on Dorfman's work, concluding that the two writers both focus heavily on “issues of the interaction of politics and language and of the mental and physical abuse of the rebellious and the powerless.”]

The skeleton of this article is what looks like a string of contingencies. The Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman's first book was a lengthy study of Harold Pinter's first play The Room (1957).¹ Some twenty years later, Pinter would date his political reawakening from the same coup in Chile by General Pinochet in 1973 that would condemn Dorfman to a seventeen-year exile.² In the mid to late 1980's, Pinter wrote two brutally stark political plays about torture and repression.³ Shortly afterwards, Dorfman dedicated to Harold Pinter his own English translation of his play La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden), set “in a country that is probably Chile, but could be any country that has given itself a democratic government just after a long period of dictatorship.”⁴ In 1991, Pinter's sketch The New World Order was used as a curtain-raiser to the London production of Dorfman's play.⁵

To flesh out these bare bones, the chronological starting point, then, is Dorfman (b. 1942), a promising young critic, working out of the unlikely place (in the context of Pinter studies, at least) of the capital of a distant third-world country,⁶ who devotes his first full-length exercise in literary analysis to a playwright from London a mere twelve years his senior. This initial connection turns much later into a friendship between two highly acclaimed creative writers who meet on an equal footing, when Pinter is instrumental in getting Dorfman's first play about the Chilean political scene produced in London, after his own writing for the theater has been transformed by his new-found interest in the politics of Chile and Central America, the Middle-East, and, of course, Britain under Margaret Thatcher. To plot this trajectory, I open with a summary of the writers' respective political involvements and commitments, continue with an analysis of the relevant plays, and close with a retrospective political reading of Dorfman's study of Pinter to show how it anticipates both the concerns of his later work on Latin America and the issues that will unite the two writers some twenty years after its publication.

For those who have followed Dorfman's intellectual and literary development from the studies of cultural imperialism such as How to Read Donald Duck (1971, written with his colleague Armando Mattelart)⁷ and his detailed unraveling of the ideological underpinnings of comics and the Reader's Digest (1980),⁸ composed under the influence of the emancipatory socialist policies of Salvador Allende's government, through the numerous fictions, poems, plays, essays, and articles of his long period in exile,⁹ it can come as no surprise that in Death and the Maiden he takes up a theme of immediate political relevance to the early post-dictatorship era. As he himself says, “My work is political, to begin with, because my life is very political—and one writes about one's life, right?”¹⁰ Dorfman's definition of politics is short but to the point: “Politics for me is the way in which moral issues are worked out in terms of power.”¹¹ Referring more specifically to Latin America, to the probable chagrin of some of his left-wing readers, Dorfman inverts the normal Marxist relationship between politics and economics: “The basic dilemma of Latin America today is not socialism or capitalism, but democracy or dictatorship”; nevertheless, this opinion certainly explains why “[p]ower and language are, above all, what draw me as a writer.” He expands this eloquently: “as an intellectual I am constantly being placed in a position in which I am asked to choose between equality and freedom. I am working extremely hard to create a life and a world where I don't have to ask that question about being in a lifeboat and who I am going to throw out, the artist or the peasant.”¹²

Harold Pinter's political evolution requires more lengthy treatment. For playgoers brought up on the early so-called “comedies of menace” (The Dumbwaiter, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker) and who had then accustomed themselves to Pinter's exploration of the tricks and manipulations of memory and of the small and large deceits often at the heart of friendship and passion (as in Old Times, No Man's Land, and Betrayal), his turn to the nastier aspects of political life must have come as something of a shock.

In 1961 Pinter had stated: “I'm not committed as a writer. … I'm not conscious of any particular social function. … I don't see any placards on myself, and I don't carry any banners.”¹³ Five years later, he repeated the same view, but then went on with the following by now much repeated quotation: “I'll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame-thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then enquire from them how they would assess this action from a political point of view.”¹⁴ We shall have more than one occasion to relate Pinter's attitudes and actions to the politics fueled by anger and outrage. In 1971, he pronounced himself “horrified” by the suffering for which politicians are responsible¹⁵ but even in 1981 still claimed that his by then “strong political views” did not find their way into his work.¹⁶

Actually, a major change had occurred in 1973 on account of the same event that would affect Dorfman much more directly: “After all these years [Pinter was to say in the late 1980's], in a way ever since Chile in 1973, I have become more engaged in political matters.”¹⁷ In the same year that Dorfman was finishing Death and the Maiden, Pinter was capable of being much more explicit about his reaction to Pinochet's coup: “I just froze with horror, it absolutely knocked me sideways, and my disgust was so profound at what I immediately understood to have happened, which was, of course, a military coup supported by the United States. I was just amazed at the duplicity of the language that was used. … I began following the course of other upheavals in the world. And the more I did the more I felt it my responsibility to do something about them.”¹⁸ Again the gut reaction, but also the concern with hypocrisy and the misuse of language, and with his role as citizen rather than writer. In October 1989 he had been quite clear as to what sort of responsibility this was: “I understand my responsibilities quite precisely as trying to find out what the truth is.”¹⁹

This was for Pinter the revival of an older political awareness, since he had been attacked by fascist groups in the East End of London just after the Second World War either for being Jewish (which he was) or for being a Communist (which he was not), though he did tend to carry around a lot of books, which for the fascist groups was the same thing!²⁰ Also, he was a conscientious objector in 1948, not through any religious or pacifist motives, but because “I disapproved of the Cold War and wasn't going to help it along as a boy of 18.”²¹ After that, for about twenty years Pinter was in a political wilderness: “I didn't know how to deal with the problems of the world, so I went away into my own pursuits.”²²

Following the impact of the events in Chile in September 1973, Pinter went on to become an active member of Amnesty International, PEN, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement, vociferously supported the liberation movements in Central America as well as the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and worked hard to promote the rights of political prisoners around the world. In Margaret Thatcher's England, Pinter donated royalties to the coalminers' strike fund in 1984, formed in 1988 (at the instigation of the writer John Mortimer) the “20 June group,” a loose-knit collection of anti-Thatcher intellectuals which worked out of his own very well appointed home—a fact that got them lampooned in the ultra-conservative press as the “Bollinger Bolsheviks”—and supported Charter 88, which advocated a constitution and bill of rights for the United Kingdom that would guarantee its citizens their privileges and freedoms. On 11 September 1993, accompanied by the actress Julie Christie, Pinter delivered a wreath to the Chilean ambassador to the United States in memory of those who had died in the coup twenty years earlier.²³

It is difficult to fault the pedigree of these initiatives (Pinter is aware that his efforts as a citizen are enhanced by his status as a world-famous writer²⁴), but we can interrogate the motivations of his politics. Here are some of Pinter's recent statements: “US foreign policy could best be defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in”;²⁵ “While we're talking … people are locked up in prisons all over the place being tortured in one way or another. I'm quite raddled with these kinds of images.”²⁶ Commenting on the political links he sees between the early and the recent plays, Pinter elides the helplessness of individuals into the misfortunes of small, vulnerable nations: “It's the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual. I believe that is precisely what the US is doing to Nicaragua.”²⁷ Finally, referring to his 1958 play The Birthday Party, Pinter states the following: “All Petey says is one of the most important lines I've ever written. As Stan is taken away, Petey says: ‘Stan, don't let them tell you what to do’. I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now [in December 1988].”²⁸ Pinter's is a reactive politics, a politics of negative critique, driven by feelings of outrage at offenses committed against those in no position to fight back. Hence the frustration and pessimism he sometimes seems to feel: “Finally it's hopeless. There's nothing one can achieve.”²⁹ His attitude is perhaps best summed up by a moment in a 1990 interview. Wielding “a yellow plastic flyswatter,” he says: “There's an enormous bloody fly has come in, you see. And I am definitely a fly hater.”³⁰ Pinter's sense of affront is so great that it even upsets his normally meticulous concern for the details of English grammar.

In 1989, just a year before Dorfman finished Death and the Maiden, Pinter had premiered a short, sharp piece called Mountain Language.³¹ Lasting only twenty minutes or so and inspired originally by an investigation Pinter and the American dramatist Arthur Miller had done into political imprisonment in Turkey and into the situation of the Kurds in particular on behalf of PEN International,³²Mountain Language shows a group of peasant women waiting to visit their sons and husbands who are detainees in a military prison. Since the principal theme of the play is that of a minority language at first banned and then arbitrarily permitted, it is not surprising to find that the most emphasized means of communication is through the eyes. The Young Woman confronts the Officer;³³ the Elderly Woman “stares up” at the Guard (p. 29); the Young Woman gazes at the Hooded Man (her husband), who obviously cannot return her look and anyway has to be physically supported by the Guard and the Sergeant (p. 37); the Guard “look[s] at” the Prisoner and the Elderly Woman (p. 43); and “the Sergeant walks into the room and studies the Prisoner shaking on the floor” (p. 47). These looks, expressing a whole gamut of attitudes and emotions—defiance, incomprehension, despair, scorn, anger, reproach—are essential in an environment where all forms of language are under threat.

The first casualties are names. The cast list gives none, limiting itself to the anonymity of age, gender, and/or role within—or under—the oppressive machinery of state power, but names are nonetheless crucial to the unfolding of the situations depicted in the play. It opens with the Young Woman twice rejecting the Sergeant's request for her name (“We've already given our names” [p. 11]), and when she later finally volunteers her provocatively respectable English name (Sara Johnson) to the Officer, it is only to discover that her husband is among the wrong batch of prisoners and to get herself reduced by the sergeant to an “intellectual arse” that “wobble[s] the best” (p. 25), and further to “Lady Duck Muck” who has come through the “wrong door” (pp. 38-39). She can address her husband (“Charley”) only when he collapses from the tortures inflicted upon him, while the one person whose name is given to her—a certain improbably but impeccably sounding “Joseph Dokes”—will apparently demand sexual favors in return for information about her husband's future whereabouts and condition (p. 41). Moreover, all this happens to her despite the fact that she is the only one of the women visitors—the prisoners and jailers are all men—who can speak the official state language, an ability which clearly confers no privileges. However, Pinter reserves his most telling use of names for the prison's guard dogs, one of which has bitten the Elderly Woman's hand (pp. 14-15). Protest over this elicits the gruesomely absurd claim that the dogs are trained to give their name before they bite (p. 17). But if dogs are, like soldiers, disciplined to give the equivalent of their rank and serial number, the converse may be true, and, indeed, the Guard and the Sergeant act like pre-programmed performing dogs throughout. Mountain Language is play within play, but with a devastating political vengeance.

In the most poignantly evocative moment in the play, when the visit is finally allowed, one of the women is forbidden to speak to her physically abused son because her “mountain language” has been outlawed by the state (pp. 27-29). When this rule is arbitrarily lifted in the final scene, the same woman does not utter a sound (pp. 43-47). In a typically Pinter move, it is never resolved whether her situation has rendered her incapable of speech, or whether she refuses to speak as the only form of mute resistance and protest available to her.³⁴ Further ambiguity surrounds the two brief moments when the Elderly Woman communes with her son (p. 33) and the Young Woman with her husband (p. 39) by pre-recorded “voices over” while the silhouetted figures remain motionless.³⁵ Although these characters can indulge in memories, hopes, and the need to impart good news, these fantasy scenes are in stark contrast to what is actually available to them. It is not at all clear that memory “circumvent[s]” the language of power, as Adler optimistically maintains.³⁶

Five years earlier, Pinter had written a longer (45 minutes) but no less confrontational work, One for the Road. The first and last of the play's four scenes depict interviews between an interrogator (Nicholas) and a male prisoner (Victor). Scenes 2 and 3 show the same official questioning separately the man's seven-year-old son and his wife, Gila. While many audiences are likely to be most affected by the play's final moments when the father is almost simultaneously informed of his own immediate release and, very casually, of his son's murder (apparently, for having been unpatriotic enough to kick one of the soldiers who were arresting the family), the most shocking aspect of this unrelentingly oppressive piece is the way Pinter manages to suggest that his interrogator is merely a faceless Whitehall bureaucrat with the kid gloves of a repressive superego removed.

Clearly, the focus of the play is Nicholas, and Judith Roof has summarized his position and attitude precisely: “[H]is method of mental abuse consists in stripping and remolding the family model so that he, Nicholas, is both father and son, acceding to the power of the father in an identification with the country, leader and God, as well as taking the privilege of the loyal and dutiful son, thus closing down gaps and fears as they might relate to him.”³⁷ In addition, Nicholas wants Victor to love³⁸ and respect him (p. 37), tells him that he believes Gila is falling in love with him (p. 49), and orders the death of the young rebellious son just as he castigates Gila for being the treacherous daughter of the perfect father (p. 66). In short, Nicholas' self-congratulatory claim to total power (“I can do absolutely anything I like” [p. 33] and “I run the place” [p. 36]) entails occupying himself every possible subject position within the family unit—including those of wife and daughter.³⁹ In this sense, he could never love anyone but himself, which is perhaps why he prefers the “death of others” to the pleasures of sexual intercourse (pp. 45-46). He has, in effect, castrated himself of the potential for despair involved in loving others as equals. As he himself says: “Chop the balls off and despair goes out the window. You're left with a happy man. Or a happy woman” (p. 53). And Nicholas, who oppresses and suppresses others, is irrepressibly jaunty throughout. This may only be the result of what appears to be his only Achilles heel: the ample quantity of whisky he drinks at all hours of the day or night. Yet the “one for the road” of the title signals not the “final drink”⁴⁰ but the promise to return for more: the next victim, the next “other” to be led to death. More than anything else, the phrase encapsulates perhaps the most appalling feature of torture: its routine banality.

However, if the ability to decree the “death of others” shores up Nicholas' sense of his own potency, he still needs their gaze to substantiate his sense of self. At the end of Scene 1, he gets it: “Nicholas: … Look at me. / Victor does so. / Nicholas: Your soul shines out of your eyes” (p. 53). Victor's meek obedience and Nicholas' buoyant confidence suggest that the latter does not see Victor's soul at all but a reflection of his own power. The position is not quite so clear in the parallel ending of Scene 4 which closes the play: “Nicholas: Your son? Oh, don't worry about him. He was a little prick.⁴¹ / Victor straightens and stares at Nicholas. / Silence. / Blackout” (pp. 79-80). As Roof, who is very eloquent about Pinter's use of eyes in this play, maintains, the audience cannot know whether Victor's reaction to the past tense (“was”) with regard to his son is one of shock, defeat, or defiance, but neither is it clear that “the power certified by the look becomes the power threatened by the look.”⁴² While Nicholas obviously needs the power over others vested in him and the ontological security their dependence on him brings, there seems little reason to assume that his individual breakdown would bring with it the collapse of the order he represents. What is more, as in Mountain Language, that order seems more interested in words than eyes. At the end of the play, Victor, who has a house “with lots of books” (p. 41) and is supposed to like “the cut and thrust of debate” (p. 45), experiences enormous difficulty in saying anything at all: “Nicholas: I can't hear you. / Victor: It's my mouth. / Nicholas: Mouth? / Victor: Tongue. / Nicholas: What's the matter with it?” (pp. 76-77). Nicholas' last question, which viciously mimics a father's or doctor's concern, is never answered, leaving undecided whether Victor has been silenced (unmanned, made useless) for good.⁴³ Once more, Pinter has left his audience with the discomfort of a situation unresolved.

In the very brief The New World Order,⁴⁴ which was used as a kind of overture to Death and the Maiden in London, two interrogators stare at and talk about their male victim sitting blind-folded on a chair in front of them. They discuss vaguely but threateningly what they are going to do to him and, later, to his wife—not as though he were not there, but rather in the full knowledge that they have absolute power over him, in the certainty that he can do nothing but listen (he is silent throughout). Ironically, Pinter introduces his concern with accuracy and truth in language into the interrogators' own dialogue when one upbraids the other for referring to their prisoner in conventionally crude terms for both male and female genitals: “The terms are mutually contradictory. You'd lose face in any linguistic discussion, take my tip” (p. 30). They may be “contradictory,” but both terms apply to the prisoner who, although male, is now vulnerable to any thrust of his tormentors' power, passively open to any violation they may inflict on him. As in One for the Road and Mountain Language, in the aggressively reactionary discursive world of Pinter's interrogators and military, the male victim must be literally or symbolically emasculated, while all notions of the female must be ridiculed, negated, or destroyed.

This connection between sexual potency and effective language use is reinforced by the reasons for the prisoner's detention: “Before he came here, he was a big shot, he never stopped shooting his mouth off, he never stopped questioning received ideas” (p. 30; italics mine). Clearly, the opposition's policies are conceived here not only as a political threat but as an affront to the establishment's representatives' whole sense of self-worth, thereby adding a nuance to the absence of newspapers—a further attempt to suppress the power of the word—where the prisoner might have gained the advantage of already knowing what is now about to happen to him (p. 29). The interrogators' language, on the other hand, is revealingly merely a hotch-potch of set phrases and “received ideas” (as illustrated in the above quotations), sprinkled with equally predictable swear-words.

The close of the sketch is an exercise in perhaps overly contrived ambiguities. One of the interrogators, overcome with emotion, announces that he feels “so pure,” the other responding that he has every right to do so and explaining why:

DES:
Because you're keeping the world clean for democracy.
They look into each other's eyes.
DES:
I'm going to shake you by the hand.
Des shakes Lionel's hand. He then gestures to the man in the chair with his thumb.
DES:
And so will he … (he looks at his watch) … in about thirty-five minutes.

(p. 30)

The overtones of sexual power are clear: the mutual adulation of the all but loving look into each other's eyes, the heartfelt handshake (the “taking” of each other's “tips”?) and the dismissive gesture with the erect penile thumb. Other elements in the scene are less convincing, however. The abrupt reference to a specific short period of time is on the surface very effective. Yet, practiced resistance fighters, trained to countenance the ever present possibility of arrest, interrogation, and torture, might well feel empowered by the knowledge that they had to endure for only thirty-five minutes, even if—perhaps especially if—they were sure the session would result in their death. But in this case, it may not. Critics are divided as to whether the phrase “so will he [the prisoner]” refers to “keeping the world clean for democracy” (which would seem to imply his imminent liquidation) or to “I'm going to shake you by the hand” (suggesting sinister possibilities for the victim's future while still alive).⁴⁵ Either way, of course, Pinter mounts a frontal assault on the interrogators' “received” conceptions of purity, cleanliness, and democracy.

What Colleran writes about Mountain Language is true of all three of Pinter's works discussed above: “in overlaying the brutal fascism of a prison camp with British mannerisms, Pinter violently dismantles … distinctions clung to about the exclusivity of British civilisation.”⁴⁶ This is undoubtedly one of the most confrontational aspects of these plays but is a technique which can cut two ways: it may alienate audiences by causing disbelief—it cannot happen here; or it may bring them to a closer understanding of what is happening to some of their contemporaries in parts of the world they might visit on vacation. However, this exposure of the savage machinations of repressive power and its effect on individuals does severely limit the possibilities of showing how such regimes may be undermined or overthrown, thus inadvertently suggesting that they may be invincible.⁴⁷ Such a conclusion loops back to the pessimism noted before in some of Pinter's interviews.

In 1990, shortly after being able to return to his native land for the first time in seventeen years, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman completed his play Death and the Maiden.⁴⁸ Among those listed in the program for the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Death and the Maiden as having encouraged Dorfman because they “believed in the play before it was ever staged” is the name of Harold Pinter.⁴⁹ Moreover, the English translation of the play is dedicated to him along with another person who also appears on the Sydney role of honor.

Set in a country which, like Chile, had just returned to democracy and the rule of law after a long period of dictatorship, the work has only three characters: Gerardo, a successful lawyer who has just been appointed to head a commission to investigate the fate of the “disappeared” and of others who had “died in custody” during the dictatorship; Paulina, his wife, still traumatized by her own experience of imprisonment and torture; and Roberto, a doctor, invited home by Gerardo after being given a lift by him when his own car blew a tire. In Roberto, Paulina believes she recognizes one of her torturers and, embittered and offended by having her own plight and that of all survivors excluded from the terms of reference of her husband's commission, decides to put on her own trial in her own home. The play stages a drama between a victim who demands justice for herself and others, an accused whose innocence or guilt cannot be definitively established either way, and a principled but pragmatic lawyer trying to pick a delicate path between two conflicting sets of demands.

While not attempting to offer a full study of the play, the following paragraphs hope to identify its two principal political themes and suggest the links between them: the issue of power and control in the relationship between Paulina and Gerardo, and Paulina's attempt to counter her own and many others' marginalization from the new democratic government's investigation of abuses carried out under the previous regime.

The conflict between husband and wife can be approached by looking at two moments that mirror one another. In Act II, Scene 1, Paulina is trying to get a reluctant Gerardo to repeat what she had told him years ago about being repeatedly raped while in detention. She then reminds him of his promise that one day the perpetrators would be put on trial, and asks to whom she can now appeal.⁵⁰ Gerardo can only weakly reply that “that was fifteen years ago” (p. 30). In the parallel moment from Act III, Scene 1, she quietly but firmly interrogates him about how many times he went to bed with the lover he briefly took while she was in jail being punished for refusing to divulge his name (pp. 43-44). In both cases, the issue is Gerardo's betrayal of her, his preference for denying or not recognizing the validity of her experience, and his refusal to face the consequences. She eventually rebels—“All my life, I've always been too obedient” (p. 46)—beginning with the only apparently trivial gestures of questioning which of them is responsible for not having replaced the car's spare tire (p. 2) and of giving Gerardo's car jack to her mother (p. 3), a clear act of female solidarity. It is these actions that will bring her presumed torturer to her home, which she will then transform into her own court and interrogation room, mimicking the dictatorship's conversion of private houses into torture chambers. Similarly, in dragging the truth out of her husband, she imitates the perseverance of an interrogator. She thus runs the risk of becoming what she opposes.

The link between Paulina's emotional and moral tussle with her husband and the larger question of her exclusion from the commission's deliberations is ironically made twice by Gerardo himself. First to Roberto: “I think I understand Paulina's need. It coincides with the need of the whole country. The need to put into words what happened to us” (p. 39); and secondly to Paulina herself in the second of the scenes mentioned above: “we survived, and now we're going to do to each other what those bastards out there weren't able to do to us” (p. 44). For Dorfman, the re-assembling of the fabric of a society torn apart by the violence of dictatorship and virtual civil war crucially involves allowing the voices of the oppressed victims silenced by the official order to speak at last. However, this cannot be achieved unless individuals and families, themselves broken by or in the conflict, can face the difficult truths of their own and each other's stories.

This does not lead, of course, to some vast but vacuous univocal narrative of national consensus, but rather to a plurality of often clashing voices, all of which must somehow be persuaded to allow the others to be heard. After all, Roberto, whom Paulina identifies as the torturer who sullied Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet by having it playing in the background of his sessions with her, is seen by Gerardo as a friend who magnanimously offered him a lift when he was stranded in a storm beside a car with no jack or spare tire. And Roberto has his own story to tell: his protestations of innocence are as vehement throughout as Paulina's accusations against him. This conflict is never resolved, as their final exchange shows:

ROBERTO:
So we go on and on with violence, always more violence. Yesterday they did terrible things to you and now you do terrible things to me and tomorrow the same cycle will begin all over again. Isn't it time we stopped?
PAULINA:
Why is it always people like me who have to sacrifice, who have to concede when concessions are needed, biting my tongue, why? Well, not this time. If only to do justice in one case, just one. What do we lose? What do we lose by killing one of you? What do we lose?

(p. 53)

The stage directions immediately following ask for Mozart's Dissonant Quartet to be played.⁵¹

Concessions are in fact made. Through the mediation of Gerardo, Roberto makes a full confession, which may or may not be false, while Paulina relents enough, apparently, not to pull the trigger of the gun she is aiming at him. In the play's final scene (pp. 54-56), after the release of Gerardo's report which he hopes “will help in the slow, patient process of healing” (p. 55), Paulina looks for a moment at Roberto who has also taken his place in the concert hall to hear Death and the Maiden. However, the stage direction reads: “He could be real or he could be an illusion in Paulina's head” (p. 55). Reconciliation is to be tentative and fragile, if it takes place at all.

On the politics of Death and the Maiden, Dorfman is admirably clear: “The tragedy is that we must learn to live with those who have repressed us. To repress them would turn ourselves into them. So unless there is true reconciliation and repentance, during which society really opens itself up to learn what happened, we are not going to overcome the tragedy.”⁵² Or, as he says more personally: “I'm going to have to find a way of sitting down at the table with people who may have been responsible for killing my friends.” Dorfman does not use the first person complacently to absolve himself of responsibility: “[W]e must contend with the problem of how we allowed Pinochet to happen. What lack of self-understanding could have permitted these events to occur?”⁵³

To begin to draw some of the threads of this article together, it is best to enumerate certain of the significant points that might link all of these plays together. First, all the works caused considerable controversy. Dorfman anticipated that he would be accused of reopening old wounds or of criticizing President Alwyn's Rettig commission.⁵⁴ On Pinter's side, the author accepts that significant numbers of people have walked out of performances, particularly of One for the Road, but the playwright maintains that such people cannot face the nature of the truths he is placing before them.⁵⁵

Such controversy stems in large part from the confrontational relationship both authors wish their works to have with their audiences. As we watch “the Paulinas, the Gerardos, the Robertos of this world,” Dorfman wants us “to figure out for ourselves which of these three we most resemble, how much of our secluded lives are expressed in each of these characters and in all of them.”⁵⁶ Indeed, the play is marred, in my view, when Dorfman labors the obvious by asking for a huge mirror to be lowered before its final scene so that the audience can look at itself (p. 53). Pinter, likewise, wants us to recognize facets of ourselves “both in the position of the given victim” and in the interrogator of One for the Road: “Think of the joy of having absolute power,”⁵⁷ he challenges himself and the spectator.

Finally, although all the works discussed here end in ambiguity or unresolved conflict, there is a major difference in the way each author employs this technique. Pinter wants to stimulate or even force the members of the audience to face truths he believes they would prefer to avoid. However, they are truths the audience can do nothing about except acknowledge their existence. Dorfman, on the other hand, also wants to stir up those in the audience, to wake them from complacency, but in the knowledge that both he and they must work to resolve the questions raised if what is required is to be achieved. Dorfman is as offended by assaults on the individual as Pinter, and he is equally drawn by the relationship between power and language. However, as we have seen, he and the characters in his work think politically—and look to creating a different and better world. Politics for Dorfman is part of the air he breathes, an inevitable part of the way he lives, a necessary ingredient in thinking through the business of living. This is not the case for Pinter and his plays. They respond to violence with violence, they attack the destroyers, while offering little in the way of hope for their victims. Dorfman's is a politics of reconstruction, while Pinter's is one of deconstructing those who wield power. This difference would seem to be as much a matter of context (of responses to the exigencies of their respective views of the worlds they inhabit) as the function that politics has played in their life and work generally.

But these differences between the two writers were not always so marked. As noted in the introduction to this essay, Dorfman's first book in 1968 was precisely a study of Harold Pinter which combined existentialism and the then very influential notion of the “theater of the absurd” to look at the ways in which violence or the threat of it impinges on Pinter's characters' relationships with one another and the world they inhabit. Although it is one of the earliest book-length analyses of Pinter's work and the first, as far as I know, to be published anywhere in the third world, it is virtually unmentioned by Dorfman's critics,⁵⁸ while the only Pinter specialist I have come across who claims to have read it writes of it as follows: “Mainly a summary of other critics. Several pages are missing because of an error in the printing.”⁵⁹ In fact, Dorfman goes to some lengths to acknowledge his critical debts but also to show how he differs from them,⁶⁰ while the second statement is not true of my copy. Dorfman concentrates almost exclusively on Pinter's first play The Room, a sociologically and psychoanalytically suggestive piece in which the protagonist, Rose, struggles in vain to ward off a number of threats to her sense of security which she invests in the room where she lives with her frequently absent husband.

However, the importance of Dorfman's first book for me does not lie in its contribution to Pinter studies but rather, given the Pinochet coup and its aftermath together with the impact of these events on both writers, in the uncanny prescience of the terms of Dorfman's analysis. The work opens with an epigraph written by the author himself: “This is the story of a nightmare. And of its understanding and transcendence through art. We have all lived, have watched being lived or have dreamt this nightmare. Not all of us have known how to go beyond it.” In Pinter's world, Dorfman tells us, “situations change only once, but on that occasion they change violently” (p. 11). Pinter's works show us “the moment when everything that was feared would happen, in fact happened” (p. 12). He portrays the contrast between “the comfortable reality of everyday, so like our own, and that other reality which erupts violently and threateningly, bringing destruction and sometimes death” (p. 14), and illustrates “one of the most terrible of modern phenomena: indifference to the suffering of others” (p. 21). “The audience feels,” Dorfman writes, “that beneath this world with no apparent contradictions (although in fact they are there, hidden, but cannot be easily located) there is another reality which, submerged in the unconscious, is afraid to emerge” (pp. 35-36). This recalls his remarks quoted above which intimate that it is not only the supporters of the dictatorship who need to question the degree of their complicity with it: even the scrupulously liberal lawyer in Death and the Maiden is subject to the temptation of being an authoritarian with his wife.

If all this seems to anticipate the condition of being tyrannized by the projection into reality of our worst fears, Dorfman's version of Pinter also foresees that such a situation cannot be maintained indefinitely. “It is useless, Pinter tells us, to try to create a truth by dominating others, unless the executioner already effectively has the power and the knowledge,” in which case he is only putting into practice what was already latently present. In the end, however, any attempt to “construct a closed, conventional universe with neither doubts nor problems” in which one can seek refuge “will be destroyed by reality itself” (p. 67). Dorfman seems to herald both his and Pinter's later works—as well as the fate of many of his compatriots who put their faith in the Unidad Popular—when he writes: “To give oneself wholly to the imagination is dangerous and even fatal, since it is equivalent to putting the present situation in doubt, to positing possible alternatives, to being bold enough to come out into another world, far from the limitations of the immediate. The consequence is punishment (or liberty)” (p. 90).

El absurdo entre cuatro paredes is the only work by Dorfman to give itself the luxury of not dealing directly with Chile or Latin America. The very title of his second book, Imaginación y violencia en América (1970),⁶¹ linking as it does imagination with violence, recalls Dorfman's primordial interest as a writer in the connection between language and power, while the violence he has found waiting to happen in Pinter's The Room determines his general approach to Latin American literature in this book: “In Latin America, violence is not the second pole or term of a duality, an alternative facing which one can take a stand with some reasonableness or apparent indifference. It is the very structure in which I find myself” (p. 15). This is because Latin American “violence …, produced by a system which forces ninety percent of its inhabitants not even to know whether they will live beyond tomorrow, is also fed by the intoxicating insecurity of a continent that is looking for its identity, that adopts contradictory standards by which to live and act” (p. 17). Having given the violence at the center of one's being a new and urgent social context, Dorfman goes on to distinguish four different kinds of violence endemic in Latin American life and culture: “vertical and social violence,” which is a response to oppression directed by those on the bottom of the social heap at those further up and may find its way into political activity (p. 19); “horizontal and individual violence,” which conceives the world “as prison or labyrinth or urban jungle” where “people on the same existential level of misery and alienation fight among themselves” (pp. 26-27); “non-spatial and internal violence,” the kind which out of frustration people direct at themselves (pp. 36-40); “narrative violence,” an aesthetic act of protest, a violent attempt at waking readers up to ask the questions necessary for them to become fully human (pp. 40-41), a category which bears a strong resemblance to that at which both Pinter and Dorfman were aiming in the works analyzed earlier. He ends the introductory chapter by describing Latin America as “a world engendered by violence, in which each person both threatens and is threatened,” where people survive but only at the price of more violence which ends up engulfing them (p. 42)—a formulation which recalls the world Dorfman had disclosed in his reading of Pinter as well as the dilemma posed at the close of Death and the Maiden. Dorfman ends Imaginación y violencia by contrasting two major Peruvian novelists. In José María Arguedas he finds that “literature's fundamental subversion is political and social, and in the profound sense, liberating,” while in Mario Vargas Llosa “subversion is literary, individual, a breaking down of dogmatic, established worlds”; and he concludes provocatively that “[w]e, readers, Latin Americans, live, dream, hesitate between these two worlds” (p. 247). Here he seems to pick up on an insight from his previous book about Pinter: “the essence of Pinter's world is the division, the projection of the personality into two opposing parts. A clash between the two worlds is inevitable. … Every moment of equilibrium is a truce in a long war” (El absurdo, p. 114). The divisions of a single personality become the opposing political options available in a wider world.

The violence or threat of it associated with the protection of one's personal space or territory that Dorfman found exemplified in Pinter's early work leads directly to his first important analyses of modern Latin American literature and of the society projected in it, an approach which anticipates the major questions raised in Death and the Maiden some twenty years later. Pinter, meanwhile, discovered through his reaction to the military coup in Dorfman's native Chile that there was a link between his early plays that so fascinated Dorfman and his understanding of the repressive politics practiced in Latin America and elsewhere—a realization that changed completely, at least for a while, the kind of theater that he himself wrote. Both writers, despite their different perspectives, met over the issues of the interaction of politics and language and of the mental and physical abuse of the rebellious and the powerless. As a result, Pinter would mirror Dorfman's original interest in his work set in post-war England by promoting in London Dorfman's play about post-dictatorship Chile. This curious intermixing of the theater and politics of the metropolis and the periphery is, I would suggest, a small example of what Dorfman hoped audiences would feel as they watched the struggles of the characters in Death and the Maiden: “that strange trembling state of humanity we call recognition, a bridge across our divided globe.”⁶²

Notes

1. Ariel Dorfman, El absurdo entre cuatro paredes: El teatro de Harold Pinter [The Absurd within Four Walls: Harold Pinter's Theater] (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1968); subsequent references to this work are to this edition.

2. See the interview “Pinter among the Poets” in Andrew Graham-Yooll, After the Despots: Latin American Views and Interviews (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 154.

3. Harold Pinter, One for the Road (London: Methuen, 1985) and Mountain Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1988).

4. Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden (London: Nick Hern Books, 1992).

5. See Ronald Knowles, “From London: Harold Pinter 1991,” Pinter Review, 5 (1991), 67.

6. A point made by Dorfman himself in a private letter to the author (5 Sept. 1995).

7. Ariel Dorfman and Armando Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, trans. David Kunzle (1975; rpt. New York: International General, 1984).

8. Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

9. Salvador Oropesa (La obra de Ariel Dorfman: ficción y crítica [Madrid: Pliegos, 1992]), canvassing Dorfman's major works since the early 1970's, uses an aggressive combination of Marxist and post-structuralist theory to look for the aesthetic and ideological traces in them of what the Left has commonly seen as Allende's and the Unidad Popular's major error: its attempt to invert the power ratio between the upper and/or middle classes and the petit-bourgeoisie and proletariat, while leaving the principal features of the traditional bourgeois order intact.

10. Quoted by Peggy Boyers and Juan Carlos Lertora, “Ideology, Exile, Language: An Interview with Ariel Dorfman,” Salmagundi, 82, No. 3 (1989), 144.

11. John Incledon, “Liberating the Reader: A Conversation with Ariel Dorfman,” Chasqui, 20, No. 1 (1991), 100.

12. Quoted in Boyers and Letora, “Ideology, Exile, Language,” pp. 144, 148, 150.

13. Harold Pinter, “Writing for Myself,” Twentieth Century, 169 (1961), 175.

14. Lawrence Bensky, “Harold Pinter: An Interview” [1966], in Pinter: A Collection of Essays, ed. Andrew Ganz (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972), p. 22.

15. Mel Gussow, Conversations with Harold Pinter (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994), p. 40.

16. Quoted by Susan Hollis Merritt, “Pinter and Politics,” in Harold Pinter: A Casebook, ed. Lois Gordon (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 133.

17. Quoted by Graham-Yooll, “Pinter among the Poets,” p. 154.

18. Stephen Schiff, “Pinter's Passions,” Vanity Fair, Sept. 1990, p. 300.

19. Gussow, Conversations with Harold Pinter, p. 85.

20. See Miriam Gross, “Pinter on Pinter” [October 1980], in Critical Essays on Harold Pinter, ed. Steven H. Gale (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), p. 40, and Bensky, “Harold Pinter: An Interview,” p. 29.

21. Quoted in Ronald Knowles, “Harold Pinter, Citizen,” Pinter Review, 3 (1989), 24. See also Nick Hern, “A Play and its Politics,” in Pinter, One for the Road, pp. 9-10.

22. Schiff, “Pinter's Passions,” p. 300. See also Anna Ford, “Radical Departures,” The Listener, 27 October 1988, p. 5, and Gussow, Conversations with Harold Pinter, p. 82.

23. Gussow, Conversations with Harold Pinter, passim; Knowles, “Harold Pinter, Citizen,” pp. 24-33; Schiff, “Pinter's Passions,” pp. 219-22, 300-03.

24. See Knowles, “Harold Pinter, Citizen,” p. 31.

25. Graham-Yooll, “Pinter among the Poets,” p. 155.

26. Gross, “Pinter on Pinter,” p. 40.

27. Gussow, Conversations with Harold Pinter, p. 69.

28. Ibid., p. 71.

29. Hern, “A Play and Its Politics,” p. 20.

30. Schiff, “Pinter's Passions,” p. 222.

31. In the following remarks on Mountain Language and One for the Road, I shall not seek to replicate the very persuasive and complete analyses already published in Judith Roof, “Staging the Ideology behind Power: Pinter's One for the Road and Beckett's Catastrophe,” Pinter Review, 2 (1988), 8-18; David Rabey, “Violation and Implication: One for the Road and Ficky Stingers,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 261-67; Marc Silverstein, “One for the Road, Mountain Language, and the Impasse of Politics,” Modern Drama, 34 (1991), 422-40; and Jeanne Colleran, “Disjuncture as Theatrical and Postmodern Practice in Griselda Gambaro's The Camp and Harold Pinter's Mountain Language,” in Pinter at Sixty, ed. Katherine H. Burkman and John L. Kundert-Gibbs (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 49-63. I have, however, drawn on these works.

32. See Gussow, Conversations with Harold Pinter, p. 68.

33. Pinter, Mountain Language, pp. 15, 19; subsequent references to this work will appear in parentheses in my text.

34. On this point, cf. Thomas P. Adler, “The Embrace of Silence: Pinter, Miller, and the Response to Silence,” Pinter Review, 5 (1991), 7; Silverstein, “One for the Road,” p. 431; and Colleran, “Disjuncture as Theatrical and Postmodern Practice,” p. 61.

35. For a detailed discussion of this technique, see Ann C. Hall, “Voices in the Dark: The Disembodied Voice in Harold Pinter's Mountain Language,” Pinter Review, 5 (1991), 17-22.

36. Adler, “The Embrace of Silence,” p. 6.

37. Roof, “Staging the Ideology,” p. 13.

38. Pinter, One for the Road, p. 49; subsequent references will appear in parentheses in my text.

39. In this sense, the son's crime is not his attack on the soldiers but his defence of the family members whose positions Nicholas tries to usurp. Significantly, the son's name is Nicky.

40. As stated in Roof, “Staging the Ideology,” p. 11.

41. In the previous scene, Nicholas has accused Gila of bringing her son up to be “a little prick” (p. 71). Nicky was a “little prick” in two ways, however: he was a seven year old boy whose name was a diminutive of Nicholas' and had been addressed by him as “my darling” (p. 59), but he was also, as it were, a troublesome little thorn in Nicholas' side.

42. Roof, “Staging the Ideology,” pp. 15-16.

43. Critics are in wide disagreement on this point. See Roof, “Staging the Ideology,” p. 15; Rabey, “Violation and Implication,” p. 263; and Pilar Zozaya, “Pinter's Angry Shout: An Analysis of The Hothouse and One for the Road,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 16 (1988), 128.

44. Harold Pinter, The New World Order, in American Drama, November 1991, pp. 28-30. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses in my text.

45. For example, Knowles, “From London,” p. 67, prefers the first, while Michael Gilsenan assumes the second in his review for the Times Literary Supplement, 16 July 1991, p. 16.

46. Colleran, “Disjuncture as Theatrical and Postmodern Practice,” p. 58.

47. On this point, see persuasively Silverstein, “One for the Road,” pp. 437-39.

48. The play has recently been made into a film by Roman Polanski.

49. See Sydney Theatre Company, Program to Death and the Maiden, p. 16. In addition, Dorfman credits Pinter with being the “godfather” of the play (private letter to the author, 5 September 1995).

50. Dorfman, Death and the Maiden, pp. 29-30; subsequent references will appear in parentheses in my text.

51. Reviewers regularly referred to the ambiguity of the play's ending—e.g., John Butt, “Guilty Conscience?” Times Literary Supplement, 28 February 1992, p. 22; Richard Hornsby, “Death and the Maiden” [review], Hudson Review, 45 (1992), 300; Eduardo Galán, “La muerte y la doncella: ¿perdonar los crímenes del fascismo?” Primer Acto, 249 (1993), 116-17.

    For those who know the Polanski film rather than the original play, it is worth noting that Dorfman, working with a co-author, rewrote large portions of the script, mainly, it seems, to accommodate or counteract the effects of the change of medium from stage to screen. A new scene is introduced in which a call to a European clinic apparently confirms that Roberto was working there at the time when Paulina claims he was her torturer, while Roberto's final statement is made on videotape instead of a cassette recorder. Unfortunately, the net result, I believe, is that viewers of the film receive a far stronger impression of the doctor's guilt than do audiences of the play.

52. Quoted in “Ariel Dorfman: A Case of Conscience,” in Graham-Yooll, After the Despots, p. 64.

53. Incledon, “Liberating the Reader,” p. 96. On this theme, see also the poem “Self-Criticism” (in Ariel Dorfman, Last Waltz in Santiago, trans. Elizabeth Grossman with the author [New York: Viking, 1988], pp. 61-62), which begins: “Let's tell the truth once and for all: / We didn't recognize them.” The poem first appeared in Spanish as “(Auto)critica(móvil),” in Ariel Dorfman, Pruebas al canto (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1980), pp. 84-85.

54. Ariel Dorfman, “Afterword,” in Death and the Maiden, p. 59.

55. Hern, “A Play and Its Politics,” pp. 11, 16-17.

56. Dorfman, “Afterword,” in Death and the Maiden, p. 61.

57. Hern, “A Play and Its Politics,” p. 17.

58. Oropesa, who provides the only full-length study of the writer to date, mentions this work in his bibliography (La obra de Ariel Dorfman, p. 171) but not in his text.

59. Steven H. Gale, Harold Pinter: An Annotated Bibliography (London: George Prior: Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978), p. 74.

60. Dorfman, El absurdo, pp. 108-09, 124; subsequent references to this work will appear in parentheses in my text.

61. Ariel Dorfman, Imaginación y violencia en América, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1972); subsequent references to this work in my text are to this edition and appear in parentheses (translations mine).

62. Dorfman, “Afterword,” in Death and the Maiden, p. 61.